ready for vegetable harvest

We are recyclers. Everything goes into the compost pile or to the pigs. What does not goes out into the recycling bin the recycling truck picks up each week: plastic, glass, magazines, shredded credit card offerings.

Last spring Dale and Susan got in touch with us. Told us there were wooden bleachers in Catonsville that were being dismantled and the wood was going in the dumpster. The dumpster! Between the 2 of them, help from a few others, we managed to get a bunch of that wood here on the farm. Then comes the hmm..what do we do with it now? Should it just be another pile of stuff waiting to be transformed? We realized we needed CSA boxes. CSA, community supported agriculture, means Homer grows as many vegetables, fruits, herbs as he can and delivers a split of what grows to people how have paid us at the beginning of the growing season. So the wood from the gym in Catonsville was converted to the frames for our CSA weekly shares. Each family has a separate box, each and every week. The bottom of the box is coated chicken wire, so we can hose everything off, cool it off in the hot summer months.

Here the boxes are on the stand that Homer built for them at the end of the hoophouse. We bought the shade cloth that covers the area, and strung the shade cloth out with metal parts from parts of the hoophouse we don't need. Same with the stand for the boxes, it was constructed to hold 20 of the boxes..which is the maximum we pick for daily. Homer will also build an insulated shell to fit on the back of the truck, and we will use the recycled freezer packs that Peggy saves for us to line the box each week.

Homer is certainly the guy who looks at stuff and sees a totally different form for the materials. He saves many things that I would get rid of, via freecycle or recycling. I read a zero household waste blog on a regular basis..the author shows a photo of the items they have been unable to recycle, reuse or eliminate getting in the last 6 months..and the contents fill up 2 baggies. We are a long way from there, but always thinking about ways that we can reduce or eliminate waste from our farm. Or from other locations by bringing cool stuff here that would end up in a landfill.

It might just be a thin line between recycling and hoarding.

The weekly share box, in close up.